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When celibacy matters: incorporating non-breeders improves demographic parameter estimates.

ABSTRACT: In long-lived species only a fraction of a population breeds at a given time. Non-breeders can represent more than half of adult individuals, calling in doubt the relevance of estimating demographic parameters from the sole breeders. Here we demonstrate the importance of considering observable non-breeders to estimate reliable demographic traits: survival, return, breeding, hatching and fledging probabilities. We study the long-lived quasi-biennial breeding wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans). In this species, the breeding cycle lasts almost a year and birds that succeed a given year tend to skip the next breeding occasion while birds that fail tend to breed again the following year. Most non-breeders remain unobservable at sea, but still a substantial number of observable non-breeders (ONB) was identified on breeding sites. Using multi-state capture-mark-recapture analyses, we used several measures to compare the performance of demographic estimates between models incorporating or ignoring ONB: bias (difference in mean), precision (difference is standard deviation) and accuracy (both differences in mean and standard deviation). Our results highlight that ignoring ONB leads to bias and loss of accuracy on breeding probability and survival estimates. These effects are even stronger when studied in an age-dependent framework. Biases on breeding probabilities and survival increased with age leading to overestimation of survival at old age and thus actuarial senescence and underestimation of reproductive senescence. We believe our study sheds new light on the difficulties of estimating demographic parameters in species/taxa where a significant part of the population does not breed every year. Taking into account ONB appeared important to improve demographic parameter estimates, models of population dynamics and evolutionary conclusions regarding senescence within and across taxa.

SUBMITTER: Pardo D

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3612038 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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When celibacy matters: incorporating non-breeders improves demographic parameter estimates.

Pardo Deborah D Weimerskirch Henri H Barbraud Christophe C

PloS one 20130329 3

In long-lived species only a fraction of a population breeds at a given time. Non-breeders can represent more than half of adult individuals, calling in doubt the relevance of estimating demographic parameters from the sole breeders. Here we demonstrate the importance of considering observable non-breeders to estimate reliable demographic traits: survival, return, breeding, hatching and fledging probabilities. We study the long-lived quasi-biennial breeding wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans) ...[more]

PMID: 23555965

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Project description:Applicability of intravoxel incoherent motion (IVIM) imaging in the clinical setting is hampered by the limited reliability in particular of the perfusion-related parameter estimates. To alleviate this problem, various advanced postprocessing methods have been introduced. However, the underlying algorithms are not readily available and generally suffer from an increased computational burden. Contrary, several computationally fast image denoising methods have recently been proposed which are accessible online and may improve reliability of IVIM parameter estimates. The objective of the present work is to investigate the impact of image denoising on accuracy and precision of IVIM parameter estimates using comprehensive in-silico and in-vivo experiments. Image denoising is performed with four different algorithms that work on magnitude data: two algorithms which are based on nonlocal means (NLM) filtering, one algorithm that relies on local principal component analysis (LPCA) of the diffusion-weighted images, and another algorithms that exploits joint rank and edge constraints (JREC). Accuracy and precision of IVIM parameter estimates is investigated in an in-silico brain phantom and an in-vivo ground truth as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio for spatially homogenous and inhomogenous levels of Rician noise. Moreover, precision is evaluated using bootstrap analysis of in-vivo measurements. In the experiments, IVIM parameters are computed a) by using a segmented fit method and b) by performing a biexponential fit of the entire attenuation curve based on nonlinear least squares estimates. Irrespective of the fit method, the results demonstrate that reliability of IVIM parameter estimates is substantially improved by image denoising. The experiments show that the LPCA and the JREC algorithms perform in a similar manner and outperform the NLM-related methods. Relative to noisy data, accuracy of the IVIM parameters in the in-silico phantom improves after image denoising by 76-79%, 79-81%, 84-99% and precision by 74-80%, 80-83%, 84-95% for the perfusion fraction, the diffusion coefficient, and the pseudodiffusion coefficient, respectively, when the segmented fit method is used. Beyond that, the simulations reveal that denoising performance is not impeded by spatially inhomogeneous levels of Rician noise in the image. Since all investigated algorithms are freely available and work on magnitude data they can be readily applied in the clinical setting which may foster transition of IVIM imaging into clinical practice.

Dataset Information

When celibacy matters: incorporating non-breeders improves demographic parameter estimates.

Publications

When celibacy matters: incorporating non-breeders improves demographic parameter estimates.

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